A year ago, I took my tentative first steps at doing my part to take the Retronauts podcast beyond the confines of the studio. I sat down at the Tokyo offices of Enhance Games with its boss, designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and chatted for about an hour about his days working at SEGA and producing classics like Rez and Space Channel 5. It was a pretty rough setup involving a single mic on a conference table between two men and a laptop on which an interpreter Skyped in, and the sound quality was as iffy as the information was good.

On this year's return trip to BitSummit, I took a more serious approach to recording. I lugged a suitcase full of extremely heavy studio-grade recording gear along with me across the length of Japan's main island, and ended up recording seven different conversations. And they all sound a lot better than last year's tentative effort, as you can see here with the first fruit of my BitSummit 2018 efforts. Fittingly, it's a follow-up to last year's interview with Miz, focused almost entirely on the creation of Lumines, his first post-SEGA creation… which, as it happens, has a remastered version launching this month. That's kismet, folks.

While the general arrangement for this interview was the same as last year's — Miz and I conversing at a table while our interpreter Kyoko Skyped in her translation — the use of proper powered mics and a mixing board make a pretty big difference in the sound quality. It was definitely worth the agony of dragging a heavy suitcase half a mile across Kyoto's bumpy streets and up and down endless flights of subway stairs. So I can, without reservation, invite you to enjoy this latest conversation with the amazing Tetusya Mizuguchi:

Be sure to check out last year's interview for some great anecdotes about Miz's time at SEGA. Just be warned that the sound quality is, uh, a little rough. This whole podcasting-as-a-career thing has been a learning process…

Episode description: Jeremy follows up on last year's interview with Enhance Games boss and all-around video game design savant Tetsuya Mizuguchi, this time exploring the origins of musical PSP puzzle masterpiece Lumines. Just in time for the new remaster!

The really amazing thing about this interview is that it happened at all. My mapping app sent me up the wrong street to meet with Miz, and I wandered through the front gates of a girls' high school before realizing I was extremely on the wrong track. The faculty seemed amused by the very confused and very lost tourist, so happily I didn't get arrested.